“C'MON, GET HAPPY”
For many of us, the ‘Merry’ Christmas is well and
truly over and the New Year doesn’t seem so snazzy now that the fireworks have
fizzled out, at least until Australia Day. Maybe we were just expecting Santa
to bring us too much, like something to prevent that Christmas afternoon traditional
bubble-up of long repressed family niggles.
In a world constantly telling us we should be masters
of our own happiness, it can be hard to discern the truth about happiness from
the well-intentioned hopes and mantras prescribed by self-proclaimed fixit gurus.
What, do you think, it would take for you to be happy?
What would have to happen?
What would you have to possess?
What are your precursors to happiness, or can you be
happy without prior conditions?
What does it mean to be happy? What's your definition
of it?
Is happiness a goal for you, a destination, a journey;
or is it “something else”?
How will you recognise happiness if you come across
it?
How do you differentiate Happiness from, say,
contentment, quietness, stagnation, satisfaction, gratification, or gratitude?
And, come to think of it, how do we think we know if
or when we are happy?
What does happiness feel like? Or is it even a
feeling? Are there times when Happiness is something more than just a feeling?
Then what is it?
Be very wary of “wave of happiness” promises offered
by gurus and self-proclaimed ‘experts’ in exchange for their secrets to a happy
life, for a (not so) small fee. You won’t find any patented “secrets” here;
just un-commonsense suggestions for you to try for yourself. And they’re free.
If they work for you too, you’ll be happy. And so will
I.
One thing occurs to me at the outset, and I think it's
important. Happiness is a subjective thing. If, or when, I'm in a solely
objective frame of mind, I’m neither
happy nor unhappy. So every time I'm tempted to claim “I'm being purely
objective about this”, I've learned to check if I have any feelings about
the situation floating around in the vicinity. If there are traces, then I know
I'm not being as objective as I'd like to think.
SUBJECTIVE WELLBEING
Researchers who study subjective wellbeing,
a scientific term for happiness, draw on a rich, evidence-based history.
Decades of academic research reveal that happiness has a set-point that
varies from person to person, but never reaches 100 per cent, not even some of
the time.
One dominant theory, termed the ‘homeostasis theory of
wellbeing’, describes how our happiness is regulated similarly to the way our
body temperature is kept close to a set point. Our body temperature has an
optimal point of 37 degrees Celsius, and though it can change in response to
external and internal circumstances, our body engages in automatic
physiological and psychological strategies to recover that set-point: when
we’re warm we sweat, when we’re cold we shiver. When we're upset, we look for
Mum.
Having a higher or lower body temperature than the
set-point serves its purpose, but is stressful for the body to maintain over
time. The set-point reflects the optimum level at which our body seems to
function most efficiently and effectively --- happily.
Does a set-point context add to our
understanding of Happiness?
It surely does. Our happiness has a set-point too,
with research suggesting that, at best, it’s around 80 per cent. For a lot of
people, though, 80% seems way out of their reach – “I wish!”.
Although our mood fluctuates in response to changing
life circumstances, we engage in conscious and unconscious biological,
psychological and, for some, spiritual strategies to recover our particular
optimal level each time. By the time we reach adulthood, those setpoint
recovery strategies have become automatic habits. We don’t think about them,
much less monitor whether they’re still effective or healthy.
Higher or lower levels of happiness are appropriate in
response to changing situations, but without the intervention of a life-changing
context and a subsequent transforming wake-up that permanently raises the
person's median setpoint, casual overs and unders are difficult to sustain over
time.
The homeostasis theory of wellbeing extended the idea
that we operate on a ‘hedonic treadmill’ – a term introduced back in the
1970s to describe how we’re constantly seeking greater happiness but. like a gym
junkie on a treadmill, getting hot and
sweaty but not actually going anywhere much.
We know that when something perturbing happens we
engage in regulatory strategies to reduce the negative intensity. We tell
ourselves it’s only temporary, we tell ourselves we’re not really like this at
all, we tell ourselves we’re good at other things that make us OK, we tell
ourselves we knew it would happen because we’re creatures of fate. We distract
ourselves with other activities, or pop pills, or smoke/drink substances to
numb down the discomforting symptoms……. or another alternative ---- we sometimes
actively problem-solve to try and change the situation.
These strategies help to restore our set-point
following a departure below its normal state but they belong at a basic,
primitive, limited, particle-style level of consciousness and therefore have a
diminishing effectiveness over time. We never seem to rise to heights of
happiness we think we see in certain other individuals. Our defence is to label
such people, perhaps as “lucky”, “gifted”, “flaky”, “cosmic farts”, or
“fakers”.
But why can’t more of us wilfully raise our set-point?
Apart from short bursts of “inspiration”, why do our best attempts to generically
increase our happiness fail? Why can’t we achieve at least a raised median level
of contentment or, better still, what we really want – lasting happiness? Do we
really have to wait until we die and hope that we've been good enough to get
the nod from God; “Yep, you're
upstairs”?
It feels good to be happy. We can all look back on “the
happiest times of our lives” and remember how it felt. We long to get that
feeling back. But hedonic adaptation describes how we quickly get used to an
elevated mood, while the stimulus that caused it diminishes in intensity and
becomes less effective at generating additional happiness over time. That sends
us on a hunt for new and more powerful stimuli, a hunt that can become an
addiction in itself.
It takes effort and energy to maintain an elevated
mood over time. We get tired, listless, then exhausted and eventually succumb
to despair and chronic fatigue. Just as holding your arms out in front of you
becomes painful and exhausting after a while, so does trying to hold up our
flagging spirits. I know. I got ulcers, chronic fatigue, the shakes, and
depression as consequences for my flagging efforts to keep my spirits up.
This explains why changes to our happiness, in either
direction, are usually short-term. We’ve missed a vital, stabilising
“something” along the way.
Why can’t we be 100 per cent happy?
Well, maybe we can, but we don't, and I've a sneaking
suspicion that there's not much point because we didn't come here to be 100%
happy. It strikes me that there's an evolutionary imperative going on somewhere
in the background, fuelled by what I call a “divine dissatisfaction” – I can be better. As human beings we're
teased to join in this universal game of Making Progress.
It's also my observation that, while everything is
going swimmingly and we're quite comfy, we don't seem to possess much
motivation and energy for radical change. Maybe Unhappiness has an evolutionary
purpose after all, a kind of cosmic kick up the arse.
Whatever level of consciousness in which we currently
function dictates a set-point that reflects the default level at which we've
decided that we function best. The area a few degrees above and below that set
point we call our Comfort Zone. When we sink below that, we turn
to comforts, strategies, pills and therapies to quickly return us to the Land
of Nod. A higher level of happiness (Hope) we usually consign to a bin secretly
labelled “Things that can't last”. That keeps us stringing along but saves us
from actually having to do anything creative about making it more durable. No
matter how hard or long we may wish for “better”, the actual acts of wishing
and hoping stifle the likelihood of lasting happiness ever becoming a permanent
fixture. Wishing and Hoping act like condoms, preventing creation of anything
new or viable. Walt Disney has not always been our best friend.
Despite the general belief that greater happiness is worth
pursuing, any emotional highs that come during the pursuit come at a price.
Firstly we have to leave our Comfort Zone. We have to sacrifice some outdated,
unhealthy physiological and cognitive operating habits to be able to function
at a happier level. And just to make the game even more interesting, any clues
that point us how to escalate to something higher make the next step look much
less attractive than remaining parked where we are. That's why so few people
recognise or take the opportunities life provides because they seem to be
pointing in the “wrong” direction. We baulk at paying the price of freedom and
stay stuck, trapped by our own misconceptions of what happiness is and how and
where to find it.
You’ve probably heard that happier people think, feel
and see things differently. That’s true, but probably not in the way you
assume. Yes, positive attitudes, higher set-points of optimism, greater
insights and creative confidence are beneficial, but only when they come as an
act of grace, as a natural result of tapping into wider, lower and higher
levels of well-being. I found out the hard way that manufacturing and imposing
regimens of positive thinking and thinking only “good” thoughts upon yourself,
as recommended by the “fake-it-until-you-make-it” school, are not effective
tools for getting happier. If anything, they create the reverse effect by
beating up on your self and goading your inner rebel to blow his/her cover, and
you have to be constantly on your guard to keep that little shit out of sight.
I'm sure you've met someone who's so inflated by loud, aggressive positive
thinking and bloated self-image that he/she makes you instinctively cringe.
Phoney as a Bangkok watch. And such an apparently one-sided person is not to be
trusted because, sooner or later the flip side of that person will turn on you.
They cannot help it because their hidden inner saboteur takes over their life
at sub-conscious levels, just as yours will. Anything you do not acknowledge
will return to bite you on the bum. Seriously.
Research shows that people who have an artificially induced
positive mood make all sorts of mistakes when it comes to focusing attention,
solving difficult problems, spending money, and trusting others. They're out of
their actual comfort zone. Watch someone who's just won the lottery blow it all
within a year or two.
Being generally comfortable is usually OK, but
being too chilled-out for too long can be dangerous. It can
blind you to the reality that your real set-points have not moved one bit. And
your set points, especially the ones you don't yet know about, will bring
things back to their comfort zone. Always.
We are all ruled by what we don’t, or won’t know.
Ignorance is bliss, but the white ants will win.
You can not change what you don't acknowledge. And a
plea of ignorance does not excuse you from either the obligations or the
consequences of the Ruthless Rules of Reality.
But there’s so much advice on how to be
happy!
There is indeed – whole sections of bookshops and
libraries. For every seeker there's an army of charlatans (some of them
dreadfully sincere) to suck energy out of you, either in the form of time,
effort, money, or all three. A number of best-selling authors (including
Barbara Ehrenreich, Oliver Burkeman, and Ruth Whippman) have demonstrated how
those prophets of success are part of the problem.
Making people feel that they can achieve a higher
level of happiness than is actually possible without commensurately raising
one's “consciousness thermostat” contributes to a growing sense of lack,
failure and anxiety. You then develop a creeping sense that other people are
feeling something that seems to be perpetually just beyond your reach. Well,
you've just discovered that while the possibilities of mind gymnastics and
their relatives can lead you to some amazing places for a while, eventually
you'll find yourself in some kind of a dead end – a bit like a side trip I did
once coming back from Monkey Mia in the Shark Bay region of Western Australia.
For a moment or three I thought I'd blundered into an Australian remake of
“Deliverance”, with my young family nervously peering from inside the 4WD.
Self-help of the pentecostal kind is self-delusion. Self-delusion
is health and safety hazard – to others as well as yourself.
The real secret to happiness is that there
is no secret. The research shows that no matter how
grateful, mindful, or hopeful you are, it is not possible to permanently raise
your happiness set-points by logical technologies or quasi-religious rites. So
don’t fall for the myths, the lies or the secrets. Don’t fall for the so-called
‘inspirational’ quotes you hear or read. By all means accept and relish any
lifts you get from them, but don’t be naïve enough to think that you can learn
to ride a bike by simply reading a book about it. It's never going to come from
anything outside of yourself, or anything you do, or anything you think. Not
real Happiness. No. You discover it by being.
Here are some common myths about happiness, and why
they won’t help you except as markers that “There's
more to learn yet, but you're on track, keep going”.
“Happiness lies within”
Actually this is partly true, but not the way you're
thinking at the moment. And part truths blind us to the whole shazzam.
We live in a society that's now encouraging us to find
happiness from within our selves, but which aspects of which “selves” they
don't seem clear about. And it does not help that, deeply rooted within all
that comprises each of us, there is a fundamentally primitive wiring for us to
find happiness in the comfort of others.
Despite our relatively lately acquired
sophistications, we are still very much tribal animals. It's why we gather
physically and online in families, common-interest fraternities, clubs and
social groups. And since we've been doing it for aeons, that urge to cuddle
together for warmth, protection, support and comfort isn't going to evaporate
any time soon.
Nowhere is this lone-wolf -v- social animal paradox
more evident than what's emerging in the digital universe. On the one hand,
mobiles and the internet tend to trap us into bubbles of isolation; on the
other hand the technology has allowed us to gather in “tribes” that transcend
all traditional boundaries, and even enable cross-party movements like Get Up
and Mums For Refugees to actively involve individuals in having a real say, and
some influence in Government policies and actions. By and large, politicians
divorced from the real worlds of their voters have been the cause of these
movements arising, and only now are they bewildered and threatened enough to
try to join in, and at the same time depower and remove them from the main
landscape by grouping them with trade unions and Chinese spies. They have no deep
understanding of what’s really going on socially, and no strong strategies for
engaging with them. They didn't see it coming. Extremist overseas governments
are being lined up next; soon large multinational conglomerates may well be
targeted as “threats to our democracy”, and they should worry because the
politicians on their payroll who have enabled them up until now are losing
traction so quickly that the whole political system, and the class that nestles
under its feathers, are heading for a very deep ditch.
If we try to rise aloof and ignore our social
tendencies, then our pursuit of Happiness is doomed to come up as selfish
elitism or smug conceit. While it’s nice to believe and behave as if we’re in
control of our own happiness, the truth is that most of us are also needily
dependent on other people, either to “make us happy” or to give us permission
to be happy. We even make them completely to blame if we descend into “Not
happy, Jan!” – What you just said/did
has made me deeply unhappy! Apologise and debase yourself before me until I'm
happy again!!
Acknowledging and allowing for this long-inbred Social
Imperative as one of the givens of being human, is an early step toward your
evolution to higher levels of personal happiness.
Social support in the form of close relationships is
the No.1 predictor of general Happiness #101. Happiness is most
prolifically released by experiences of Connection and Sharing, and for that we need
“others”. Until we get comfortable with this as part of our starting point,
pushing further is futile.
In an over-reaction to the prevailing pandemic of
insisting that circumstances and other people must live up to “my” expectations
so that “I” can be happy, a large slice of the self-help culture urges people
to focus exclusively inward. Unfortunately the resulting exclusivity is keeping
them from one significant thing that still really matters most for happiness: sharing
with other people.
The present push toward externally self-driven
happiness is nurturing a culture of separation and loneliness. It's producing
the opposite effect.
Some more Inclusivity is needed.
There is an implicate order in evolving into a Happiness
being-state. Yes, it's true that the Source is within you, but it's equally
true that the Source is also in everything and everyone “without” you. When
you're feeling “unhappy”, it's easier to see Happiness in others. Go there
first. Play-fully in relationship. Find common ground to connect in, and share.
Getting to know others is actually the fastest, cheapest (no therapist needed)
and most reliable way of getting around your self-delusions, of getting to know
what you really are, of finding out you’re far from alone, and of getting happy
with that.
Don’t ever be tempted, though, to skip any part of
Step One – Know Yourself. Until all that you are is out on the table and you
are content with all of it, your connections will lack the clarity of candid
integrity and you'll never manage to be truly happy with anyone or anything
else. No short-cuts. Like me coming home late one night in alpine Austria, I
decided to take a short cut across the smoothly snow-covered field between me
and my ski lodge – I fell into more hidden holes than Coober Pedy. A bit like
how I was living my life at the time. Funny about that.
“You decide to be happy”
Again, it’s true...and... it's not that simple. A
feeling of unexplainable happiness can serendipitously hit you at any time. The
mistake we make is believing our minds which insist that “this burst of
happiness means something”. It often doesn't – no more or less so than a
lightning strike. And it doesn't mean anything that it doesn't mean anything.
OK?
Why spoil a moment or three of being happy by trying
to figure an explanation for it?
It's entirely possible that Happiness is a universal
Choice. But deciding “I'm gonna be happy from now on; I refuse to be unhappy
– that's for losers” isn't going to do it for you. I know; I've tried that.
It didn't work for me because the positive mind-generated declarations were
positional, so things that make me un-happy had to crop up, even if only to
balance the ledger. Same applies to you. Guaranteed, thanks to a Ruthless Rule
of Reality that “we attract what we resist.”
Another problem with “You decide to be happy” is that
it implies that people who aren’t happy just don’t want to be.
(If they wanted to be happy they would
be, and their world would change). Most unhelpful. Again, it's another
attempt at a shortcut. There are steps to be taken before “deciding to be
happy” can become a reality for you.
Happiness is a Context, a way of being that happily
holds and allows the whole repertoire of possible human experience and
feelings, including feelings that are the opposite of happy. We can easily be
happy, happily. No prizes for that. But it is also possible to feel worried,
happily. You can be fearful, happily. You can be happily unhappy. The easiest
way I've found is to remember that whenever a feeling arises that takes me out
of happiness, I simply ask myself – “I'm feeling (whatever) at the moment. Can
I be happy to go on feeling this until it's done?” Suddenly and gently, space
opens up for the shitty feeling, the discomfort or pain of tightening against
it abates, and it's now OK to have the feeling for as long as it lasts. (It's
just a feeling – something I have; it's not what I am). When the
disturbance is over and the insights gained, it is usually replaced by a kind
of gratitude.
Insisting on being happy 24/7 implies that there’s
something wrong with being not-happy; eg. sad, angry, or anxious. How so? What
could possibly be “wrong” about any god-given human feeling? The more of our
feelings we can give space to, the more human we become.
Suppose for a moment –
What if there are no “downers” in Heaven?
Maybe it got boring! What if we came here, as humans, to feel, and think and
sense everything that comes with the experience of “being human”? Everything –
not just selected bits. All that this life delivers us.
All of our emotions serve important functions,
especially the feelings we don’t particularly enjoy. It's my experience that
any titbits of wisdom and empathy I've ever gained have been from moments I was
decidedly NOT enjoying at the time. And since I've learned to be happy, and
sometimes even grateful, about being unhappy, I've grown and got happier in
ways that are very different from mere pleasure. Don't get me wrong, when
things are cruising along, I enjoy it! But when things get rockier, I celebrate
the chance to move on through. Suddenly I'm naturally feeling optimistic,
without browbeating myself with “Thou shalt think positive!!” If I can get to
this place, you surely can.
Sadness focuses our attention inwards, creating space
and time to process loss. And there's a sweetness in sadness. Anger reminds us
of things that have hurt us. And there's a whiff of exhilarating energy in
anger. Anxiety keeps us safe from harm, and it gets the adrenaline flowing.
Negative emotions are critical for our survival and, further, they fuel the
challenge to learn how to engage with life's prac. exams.. How we
constructively handle tests marks our growth to maturity and the evolution of
our soul.
Opting to pass up on difficulty and find a happy blanket to crawl
under implies that there is only one right way to be and that, interestingly,
leads to the escapism of Addiction.
When perturbation next crawls up your leg, a different
strategy could be to check the appropriateness of whatever reaction you’re
experiencing, and look for the thought it's connected to. The timing and
duration of an emotion are more critical to your overall wellbeing than whether
it is positive or negative. In fact, anywhere else but the judging human mind,
no emotion is either positive or negative; it's just a feeling. It’s our
judgments that make us either welcome or resist an experience; and it’s our
resistances that cause pain. Feelings are impermanent, they come and they go.
But our judgment labels of positive/negative, good/bad etc prevent us from
fully experiencing what's been presented to us as the next step in our journey.
Those evaluations and judgments we think are so critical to our wellbeing are
one of the ways we block our own progress. Want to prove me wrong? Go ahead,
find me a critic who's actually happy while he/she is in full fault-finding
flight.
Playwright Anton Chekov wrote, “People don’t notice
whether it’s summer or winter when they’re happy.” Our journey is not to get to
Happiness. Happy is one way of doing the journey. Un-happy is another way. And
there are more sub-flavours between those two extremes than an ice cream
parlour. Choose your flavour, and then be happy about your choice. OK?
“Think positive”
Thinking “positive” is a hallmark of many
psychological therapies, but the instruction to just “think positive thoughts”
is a naïve attempt to oversimplify a complicated process. It's also, as it
happens, psychologically unsound because it totally ignores the ruthless phenomenon
of Duality – No judgment, evaluation or qualified position.
characteristic or quality can exist without its polar opposite.
In the Content realm of human living, the Law of
Duality dictates that whenever we create a position, its opposite is
automatically created at one and the same time. As soon as we call “heads”,
“tails” is created. In this realm there can be no “up” without “down”; no
“good” without “bad”; no “in” without “out”; no “positive” without “negative”;
no “happy” without “unhappy” Whenever we take a Position on anything,
Opposition is automatically created and attracted to us. This isn't something
worth getting bent out of shape about – it's one of the Rules of the Game when
we live life at the level of Rational Mind (Content). We know this Law is
ruthlessly so. We even base the workings of our parliamentary, legal and
religious doings on adversarial Position and Opposition. The Government and the
Opposition. Prosecution and Defence, Heaven and Hell. It's how our minds work –
separate and oppose.
[Living life in Context is a different matter, but
I'll come to that in due course.]
Both Happiness and Unhappiness are feelings that
follow un-thought parent thoughts. A parent thought is an embedded conclusion
we once upon a time reached about life and ourselves in it, so long ago that we
are no longer aware of it; we no longer think it – it thinks us and sets our
Set Points. So, imposing positive thinking may paper over a contrary parent
thought and appear to work for a while, but then after time we find that it no
longer works out so well. The reason is that the “positive thought” just pushes
its negative counterparts into the background; it does not make the negative
parent thought go away. On the contrary it actually reinforces the negative it
is suppressing and sets up internal friction and contradiction, which in time
leads us to make choices and decisions that eventually “make” us do contrary
things we struggle to justify, that sabotage our best efforts and cause life to
come back and bite us on the bum in a serious way. Ever heard of a mid-life
crisis? That's our hidden negative stuff coming home to roost with a strong
message - “You missed something back
there. You’ve been ignoring me, but now it’s my turn”
Crisis is also an open invitation to step into the
shade, sit down, figure out where you are off course, postulate why, plot a new
track from where you now are to where you want to go, and deal with your inner
saboteurs. You may need some expert help with that.
The admonition to “think positive” reflects a
misappropriation of a research finding that showed happy people are more
optimistic than those less happy. It follows, then, that if we give the unhappy
people an inoculation of positive and optimistic thoughts and fiddle around
with the biochemistry that has resulted from years of stinkin' thinkin',
they’ll become happy. Pharma companies and drug dealers love and peddle this
lie in all sorts of guises that sound like “Take this and you'll feel better.”
Let me counter this at the same level at which it was
created – particle thinking. This logic could only apply if optimism and
positivity are causing the difference between the Happies and the Unhappies. Well,
they're not. For example – consider the way iron levels in our body
work. If everything is working well, our body will automatically absorb and
store just the right amount of iron. When a person lacks iron and can't get
enough from the diet, they may be prescribed iron supplements and their iron
levels return to normal.
For many, the process is as simple as identifying a
deficiency, and providing the appropriate replacement. But sometimes taking
tablets or altering diet does not work. Why? No amount of iron supplements will
work unless the body knows what to do with them, and the treatment will not be
effective in the long-term until the body learns to store the iron on its own.
Similarly, an injection of positive thinking for a
person who is chronically unhappy can be easily rejected if the unhappy
person's mind either refuses to allow it in (highly likely), or doesn’t know
what to do with it.
The human mind has one overriding principle – it will
reject by every means in its armoury any idea that runs counter to anything it
has decided is “the truth”.
Mind is cunning. It may appear to go along with your
reforms for a while, but sooner or later it will turn on your reforming efforts
with a vengeance, often showing up as physical and/or mental illness and
breakdown. If your mind has decided, for example, “You're a fat, hopeless
lump and everyone is laughing at you”, no amount of reasoning or “proof to
the contrary is ever going to have any lasting effect until you first
de-programme the criticising parent thought. And your mind is not going to let
that happen – not without the help of professional mind-changers who know
inside-out how minds operate and how to get them onside.
Some serious bottom-up and top-down reprogramming has
to happen before the person is going to be able to entertain greater median
levels of happiness, and that isn't going to happen in the same level of
consciousness at which the deficiency settings were created. We have to get
ourselves to another level of awareness. Some out-of-mind experiences are
called for – BUT – experiences that don't carry the health risks of chemical
substances that may become addictive. They entrap you even more hopelessly, and
make your predicament much worse.
If the mind hasn't been trained to acquire and apply
the appropriate resources or understanding to process a constructive thought,
it will never learn to produce it automatically.
Though some might claim that thinking positive is
based on therapeutic techniques, any therapist worth a pinch of salt would
never apply positive thinking in isolation. That would be like taking Vitamin C
to cope with a cold and not bothering to rest or re-hydrate, or even blow your
nose.
In therapy, an effective psychologist seeking to get a
client off the Positve/Negative Shuttle would work with their client to
identify, firstly, something in their life already that he/she can get enthusiastic about. Then the therapist
might invite the client to explore, with that growing Enthusiasm and her
half-sister, Curiosity, for unhelpful recurring thought patterns and cultural
and family assumptions. By then, it will be easier for the “sufferer” to
acknowledge existing undesired feelings and, together in partnership with the therapist,
develop reframing strategies to facilitate behaviour change. An enlightened
therapist would at the same time also introduce you to methods of healing that
raise your levels of curiosity about, and awareness of your inner workings,
your surroundings, of other people, other levels of consciousness and lead to
you to feel the connections that exist across all levels of the world within
and around you. It wouldn’t be a haphazard free-for-all, but a well-organised,
and supervised, plan for improvement and healing (wholing).
SO WHAT COULD WE (HAPPILY) DO?
At an individual level, we’re pretty good at knowing
the things that make us feel better when we’re occasionally sad, and we know
that if we’re too excited we need to relax before we can get to sleep. We’re
generally pretty good at episodically regulating our emotions and recovering
our set-point, wherever that might be. But what we’re addressing now is how to
move the set-points to a level that is more functional for you. Very few of us
have any idea at all how to dig ourselves out of a chronic low, or permanently
raise our default set-points.
In the face of prolonged, chronic stress, our best
efforts to recover a healthier state can fail. While the temptation may be to
withdraw and either hide until it passes or try to cope alone, by far the most
effective thing we can do is to open up about our troubles.
Whether it’s a
friend, family member, or therapist, talking helps. Give that someone the gift
of your openness. Give them the gift of allowing them to support you by hearing
you, without any expectation on them that they have to “fix” your unhappiness.
Sharing is the gift that nourishes both. As long as the person you're talking
to asks good questions, listens without judging you, and does not buy into your
stuff, you've found a friend who's worth your while.
Feeling unhappy for a prolonged period of time may
occasionally be a determined, conscious decision on the part of the individual,
perhaps for example, to pay someone back for a perceived hurt in the past (See
how I'm suffering? You did this to me! I insist that you feel bad about that!).
Whatever the present payoff for suffering is supposed
to be though, I find that chronic unhappiness, historically, is also a
consequence of stinkin' thinkin' and choices made at an earlier time when we
were too young and naïve to possess the benefit of either deep insight or
foresight. The result is clear – system failure. And that system extends beyond
the individual and their inner psychological workings to the family and social
network around them.
Happiness is both an individual and a group
responsibility.
How can that be so? Let us suppose, just for a moment,
that you and I and everyone else involved with us got together one day a long
time ago and decided Let's liven thing up a bit and workshop a
semi-improvised play.. Some bits would be funny, some sad, some
exciting, some scary, some epic, some personal, some parts easy, some parts
challenging. We wrote the storyline, agreed on who would play what characters,
and then launched into it, with no rehearsal. To add to the excitement we also
agreed, by the way, that when we entered the drama we would forget it's just pretending-as-if,
and think it's actually real. Oh, and we also agreed that, since ups and downs,
peaks and valleys are the shape of all really fruity drama, we'd be very happy
to be unhappy for a while, just to see what it feels like and what we might
learn from it............
Now of course this is just a fanciful supposition on
my part. It could not possibly be true.
Could it?
That's the kind of Happiness I'm talking about.
Happiness as a Context for living, allowing unhappinesses to be our teachers
and our agents of realisation and growth. Have you not met people who seem to
live contented, happy lives despite the direst of circumstances? Do they never
feel unhappy? Of course they do; they know unhappiness! But for them,
unhappiness is something temporary that they have; they don't fall into
the trap of assuming it is what they are.. They don't go around moaning
“I am unhappy”, If pressed they will tell you “I'm feeling unhappy
today, but this will pass, because it’s not a natural way to be”. Let such
people be your exemplars.
Meanwhile, when you are feeling low, let the words of
psychologist Dan Gilbert prompt you to step into an updraft: “If someone offers
you a pill that would make you permanently happy, you would be well advised to
run fast and run far. Emotion is a compass that gives us some information on
where we are, and a compass perpetually stuck on north is worthless.”
When you look at the world with the eyes of your soul,
you will see that all of creation, including you, is just as it should be right
now. Amid and surrounding all that you judged a moment ago as “imperfect”,
notice that something perfect is unfolding and moving through.
See if you can helicopter yourself above the snarl for
a moment and sense what that is.
Once you do, you will at last know where you're going
– happily surfing the implicate order of everything purely for the thrills of
adventure.
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